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Typos — p. 189: disideratum [= desideratum]


Juvenile delinquency

by
Anthony M. Ludovici

The New English Weekly 31, 1947, pp. 189–190


- p. 189 -
The problem of Juvenile Delinquency is becoming acute and the literature about it grows apace. In his annual report, published in June 1947, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Harold Scott, says: "Comparison of the number of children arrested in 1946 with the figures for 1945 and 1938 makes it only too clear that crime is increasing among 'the very young'." According to the Daily Mail (11.6.47), no fewer than 3,452 children under 14 years of age were arrested last year for various crimes. "Of these 1,354 were arrested for petty thefts, but there were 88 arrests for burglary and housebreaking, and even eight for stealing cars."
        To anyone who knows the literature on the subject, Kate Friedlander's book * cannot fail to make a strong appeal. It is a first-rate performance. It is comprehensive, its language is clear and wholly unequivocal, the opinions expressed are courageous and uncompromising"; and they are defended with much erudition and copious data drawn from the author's personal experience as a practising psychiatrist. Impressive, moreover, is the amount of original thought and insight which is everywhere noticeable.
        The work will inevitably become a text-book for all social workers, probation officers, magistrates and directors of re-educative homes and institutions. Meanwhile, it may be hoped that the general public and especially all parents of young children will obtain and study this valuable contribution to the International Library of Sociology and Social Reconstruction. For ultimately it is on the shoulders of the parents in the nation that Dr. Kate Friedlander quite rightly lays the responsibility for the increase of juvenile crime and for all social manifestations in the young. The nine chapters of Part I of the book, dealing with the Development Towards Social Adaptations, are so enlightening and helpful, that I should like to sec them, in pamphlet form, in the hands of every mother and father of the land. It is here that Dr. Friedlander, speaking of the child's early relationship to his mother, emphasizes the immense importance for future satisfactory behaviour of this relationship. "The primary factors," she says, "which lead to anti-social behaviour are to be found in the relationship of the mother, and later on of the father, to the child and in those other emotional factors which constitute early family life." Finally, she sums up as follows: "the primary factors leading to anti-social behaviour are represented by the attitude of the parents towards the child during the first five or six years of life."
        To sit for a couple of hours in any Court for Juvenile Offenders is soon to become convinced of the justice of Dr. Friedlander's findings; for, when one beholds the kind of mother who acknowledges, usually with much self-pity, that her child is beyond control, one cannot help, from her general manner, appearance and attitude, picturing the long history of emotional, inconsistent, unbalanced and, above all, self-indulgent behaviour which has marked her mothering of her child-delinquent.
        It was a relief to find in Dr. Friedlander's book no nonsense about a "sense of humour" — that tiresomely hackneyed panacea and supreme disideratum of the English middle and cultured classes. And here she shines even against certain of her colleagues. For once, in a Juvenile Court, I actually heard the magistrate, in summing up what had to be said in favour of the young ruffian of sixteen before him, mention that the psychiatrist

        * The Psycho-Analytical Approach to Juvenile Delinquency. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., Ltd., Demy 8vo. pp. 289. Price 18/- net.

- p. 190 -
in the case had solemnly declared that one of the fellow's major redeeming points was "his sense of humour Could a fashionable mania go further than this? It is hardly possible to think of any great scoundrel in history, including Talleyrand and Henry VIII, who had not a sense of humour. I once found myself by chance in the same railway carriage with a prominent politician and journalist who, within a year or two of this chance meeting was sentenced to a long-term of imprisonment for a heartless fraud. But throughout the whole of the hour occupied by the journey he kept me in roars of laughter by his exceedingly humorous comments on his fellow Members of Parliament, the elder statesmen of the day, and other notabilities. Yet, such is the fetichistic value of a "sense of humour" to the majority of English people that, without pausing one moment to think about the matter, they cannot imagine a villain with, or a saint without it. I challenge anyone to consult any hortatory or instructional treatise published since 1900, especially if it deals with marital or parental behaviour, but what he will find a "sense of humour" recommended as the magic solution of every difficulty. And this, despite the fact that one could safely wager any sum on the chance of every modern divorcee having a sense of humour.
        According to Dr. Friedlander, character formation, when it is of an anti-social kind, is the basic factor in subsequent delinquency. But she reasonably does not exclude, as Adler and some others would, inherited endowments. She makes it plain that these "may tend either to enhance or to minimize undesirable environmental influences." She shows how the "wish to show off" is much stronger in anti-social than in normal children, and implies the fatal connexion between subsequent undesirable traits and the self-indulgent, narcissistic mother, gloating over her child's every self-assertion, and sharply pulling him up when her pleasure over him is disturbed. Thus, she points out, "the constant alternation of too much frustration and too much gratification of primitive instinctive desire" is the "specific factor in the causation of the anti-social character formation."
        Her discussion of the gradual building up of the Super Ego, or conscience, is most instructive and she warns us against the facile reasoning of the popular mind which, when punishment fails, takes refuge in the opposite extreme "of pampering the criminal or letting him run wild." Dr. Friedlander is, moreover, no wishful thinker. She acknowledges that "the diagnosis of delinquent behaviour is one of the most difficult in psychiatry," and denies that every case is either amenable to psychotherapeutic treatment, or curable at all. Thus, she declares that "re-education is possible only with certain types of delinquents," and outlines the chief difficulties confronting the Borstal authorities. Her demands for the training of probation officers and some of the staff of Borstal institutions are probably well-founded, and when she claims that a four years course of training for workers in this field is essential, we may feel sure she is not exaggerating. Whether it will ever be practicable to secure such highly trained officers is another matter. At any rate, it is far more important to devise ways and means of immediately providing adequate instruction in correct parental behaviour for all young people, male and female.
        The whole book is a credit to the series to which it belongs. All the greater pity, therefore, that here and there it is marred by vulgarisms such as "perfectly all right," and observations hardly accurate. For instance, Dr. Friedlander writes, "The Englishman is renowned for keeping his own ethical standards in whatever part of the world he may live." — Evidently our authoress has never been a passenger on a German train travelling north from Oberammergau after the performance of the Passion Play! Nor can she have lived long in Paris or Florence. This remark of hers, however, is typical of the adulatory attitude which the pecuniary prestige of the English abroad used, in the past, to inspire in Continentals. Elsewhere she speaks of the children described in Branch Street as being the result of criminal environment. Is this so? It was not the impression I got when I read the book, unless prostitutes are habitual criminals. But, really, these are trifling matters. I would not mention them were it not that I think so highly of the book as to suggest that it deserves, in its next edition, to be cleansed of even these slight blemishes.

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